


Relocation Meta

by sanvitheartificer



Series: Relocation [4]
Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Fairly stand-alone but does apply to this series, Family Feels, Gen, Human Perry the Platypus (Phineas and Ferb), Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:13:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25650406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanvitheartificer/pseuds/sanvitheartificer
Summary: Meta and chapter liners for a story about Perry getting relocated.
Relationships: Candace Flynn & Perry the Platypus, Flynn-Fletcher Family
Series: Relocation [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1759360
Comments: 3
Kudos: 51





	Relocation Meta

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is bonus content for missing a week / also I'm personally a big fan of meta and thought processes and felt inspired to write this. If you are not, don't worry, this doesn't really impact the main story besides some edits that I'll explain elsewhere when I make them! 
> 
> About the first half of this has nothing to do with Relocation at all, so if you clicked on this without knowing the context, you can probably muddle through most of it.
> 
> This does not contain any direct spoilers, although I guess it alludes to things in the story that haven't happened yet. If you're very spoiler-adverse, maybe avoid this one?

Recently, I had a conversation where another author mentioned why they'd chosen to avoid human-to-begin-with Perry, and it made me think about it.

I chose human Perry pretty early on when I got the idea for writing a story about Perry's family refusing to let him be relocated, and the easy reason is because I'd read pretty much every human!Perry fic on AO3 and really enjoyed them.

There are a few other easy reasons for human!Perry. It makes dialogue a lot simpler; it's hard to write a character who doesn't use language at all, and I have a lot of respect for people who can manage it! And Perryshmirtz is a really popular ship, and for many people it's less weird to write humanized Perry in a romantic relationship than Perry who is still a platypus.

Neither of these reasons are about _who Perry is_ as a character – they're just about how he interacts with other characters, and ease of writing. For that reason, I personally don't think they're good primary reasons to write human!Perry.

It's not that these are bad tropes. It's fiction, and it should be fun, and if those things make stories easier/better for you, go for it! But if these are the only changes to how Perry is in canon, it reminds me of fusion AUs where the author doesn't change the plot at all, even though the new character in the role logically wouldn't make the same choices. It's like coloring a dandelion red and saying that makes it a rose.

One of my absolute favorite Phineas and Ferb fics is [Language and Other Variables](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2447171) by DesdemonaKaylose. Not only is the writing strong, they do something I haven't really seen anywhere else: they write a Perry who is very clearly _not human_ , and just the same, is definitely a _person_.

For a platypus, the status quo of his family not ever getting to know that he's a secret agent is bearable. The kinds of affection he gets from them and his place in the family are enough just as they are. It would be wonderful for Perry if his family could know; the adventures they could go on! The things his boys and him could make! But, in the end, I think pet platypus is part of who he is, too. He's not showing them every part of who he is and what he wants, but the parts of himself he does show are _honest._

I know this is kind of a weird take, because pet-Perry “doesn't do much” and pretends to be mindless, and Agent P is so _not that_ that it is difficult to imagine that any facet of Perry's personality is actually mindless. But Perry isn't human! He is a platypus! And part of being a platypus is being cared for and taking naps and loving his boys a lot, in a wordless kind of way, in a being-there kind of way, in coming home, every night.

Canon Perry is a pet, and when his kids find out, everything is different. He isn't allowed to be with them in the same way. Suddenly, Phineas sees that one part of Perry is a secret agent, a person that fights and makes plans and operates machinery, and he literally asks the question, “was any of this real? Was our relationship, you being our pet, did any of that even matter?”

And that is the thing. I think if platypus!Perry was able to let his boys know about him being a secret agent, it would take Phineas a while to get over it, although Ferb might get it a little faster? (Unfortunately, 2d doesn't give me a lot to work with for Ferb's reaction to all of this.) Even after they got over the betrayal of him 'lying', Perry would lose some ease, some simple understanding of himself as a pet. I don't think Perry really wants them to find out, not only because of relocation, but because in a lot of ways, he likes the way things are. If they could see all that he is and appreciate all of it, and still understand that being a pet is a _real part_ of that, that would be the best of all, but the way things are is not that bad.

For a human, that status quo of his family not-really-knowing-him is much more of a lie. He loves his family, but the person he is with them is not just incomplete when you exclude the fact that he's a secret agent, it's _inaccurate_. And that makes the eventual reveal more interesting to me: it's catharsis; it's the resolution of a problem.

Given that, if I wrote a story about platypus Perry being relocated, it would be a lot more about figuring out who he is, and what it means to be a person who's platypus-shaped in a mostly human world, and, yes, about his relationship with the Flynn-Fletchers, but mostly it would be his relationship with _Phineas and Ferb_ , because in canon, they are primarily his owners. Linda, Lawrence, and Candace are auxiliary at best. And that wasn't the story I wanted to tell.

I chose to write human Perry because I wanted to tell a story about a family. The ways in which each of them interrelate matter. There's scenes with Ferb and Candace! Lawrence and Candace! Phineas and Ferb and Candace! Lawrence and Linda get to be good parents in this. They're important to the story, and their relationships with all their kids are important, too. They're a family, and this story is about the whole family coming together to rescue Perry, not just Phineas and Ferb.

Along the way, Relocation has developed some really cool parallels between Candace and Perry that I wasn't expecting at all. That, and asking “why human Perry” has made me reconsider one of the big details of Perry's characterization. I'll be writing an author's note on the main story as well, but essentially, I realized everything made a lot more sense if I imagined Perry a few years younger and a couple decibels angrier.

For the rest of this story, Candace and Perry are both Linda and Lawrence's kids, even though Perry is more than a decade older. Perry is still kind-of an uncle to Phineas and Ferb but mostly he's a much older brother.

I love the way this plays into the themes. Perry makes a much better foil for Candace when they're on the same 'level'. If he's an adult-y adult with like twenty years on her, it's kind of weird that he's not making better choices and refuses to back her up at all. When he grew up with her and is still dealing with some shit, it's not as strange to me that backing her up when she tells her secrets feels too much like telling his own.

Also, I think “repressed kid's secrets get revealed and his family fights to get him back, to show him they love him no matter what” is significantly more powerful than “repressed young adult who's kind of related to a family's secret gets revealed and he gets rescued by his nephews and his very determined niece (because they love him no matter what),” even though practically the differences between those two stories are very small!

It really clarifies the way Linda and Lawrence relate to Perry. While it's not that unusual to have someone who's not nuclear family living with you, even in the US, I can't imagine most versions of Uncle Perry choosing to live with Lawrence and Linda. He's really independent and he doesn't really like asking for help, is the thing. He doesn't tell people his emotions! Going against the unspoken norm that adults who aren't dating don't live together, especially if some of said adults have kids, is not something Perry would choose to do, even if it's what would make him happy.

During this story, Perry is 28, Candace is 16, the boys are 12, and Heinz is 41. When Linda and Lawrence first started dating, the boys were 3, Candace was 7, and Perry was 19. Perry moved in with Lawrence when he was about 15 after some traumatizing events. He's still definitely much older – but a cool older brother figure, not an uncle.

Despite how human canon Perry sometimes seems, he's _not_ human, and that makes a difference. I hope that the story I've chosen to tell adequately reflects this. Perry is human here, and that impacts his characterization, his story, his relationship with other characters, and how he exists in the world.


End file.
